Historically, geography has as much emerged from societal needs and questions as it was propagated through purely academic interests. Geographical societies, often populated by statespeople, industrialists, and bureaucrats played an important role in establishing geography at universities in the late 19^th and early 20^th century in many places. Similarly, needs to professionalize geographical primary and secondary education informed many priorities of the emergent university discipline.

Thus, modern geography did emerge at the border of the science-society interface. One could even argue that the discipline tends to thrive whenever this interface is successfully traversed. Consequently, geography has had longstanding debates along this axis: on the necessity to “be relevant”, on the role of “applied research” as a foundation of the discipline, and on geography and public policy (Lin et al., 2022).

The canonical international example here may be urban and regional planning, where in many contexts geographical research played a pivotal role in how 20^th century cities were shaped, but similar examples can be drawn on from ecological research, development studies, tourism geographies, heritage studies etcetera.

This session aims to highlight and compare instances of traversing the science-society interface in geographical research, both contemporaneously and historically, with the ambition of achieving a comparative understanding of this relationship. Paper topics could be about, but are not limited to:

– The tensions and synergies between “fundamental” and “applied” research

– The relationship between geography and public policy

– Strategies and critiques on “having societal impact” as geographers

– How geographers organized for societal impact

– Historical studies of impactful geographical research

Reference

Lin, S., Sidaway, J. D., Van Meeteren, M., Boyle, M., & Hall, T. (2022). Trajectories of geography and public policy. Space and Polity, 26(2), pp. 77–87.